David Gowan – Coldwell Banker

David has worked with me selling an SF condo and purchasing both a house and condo. He’s a joy to work with, accommodating, fun, tremendously knowledgable, quick, efficient, and a good negotiator. You couldn’t ask for more in a realtor.
When selling my condo, he knew exactly the right price to put on it so we had multiple offers after one open house. The transaction moved swiftly and flawlessly.
To purchase a new place, bidding is a whole different tactic. I lost out on the first house I saw simply because there were too many offers and I couldn’t go as high as all the others. The second house, I had to bid against one other couple and decided to only go to a certain limit due to the area and work involved in fixing it up. The third house I saw David informed me immediately that it had been on the market for awhile so there was room to negotiate. Negotiate we did, and landed the house quickly.
When ever I want to buy or sell, David is who I would call. He’s been in the business a long time and knows SF and South Bay very well.

About 6 months ago my wife and I, who live in Seattle, decided to purchase a home in the Bay Area as an investment property. This presented innumerable challenges given that we were out of touch with the real estate dynamics of the various regions in the Bay Area and were not quite certain of the type of home we wanted or where we wanted to buy. It needed to be rentable, but nice enough to consider as a retirement option 10 years down the road. Fortunately, we found David. He was diligent in understanding our objectives and was patient as we explored areas in San Francisco, Mill Valley, and even Northern Marin. Incredibly, he was intimately familiar with the real estate options, advantages, and opportunities in all of these areas. He showed us a wide range of options that enabled us to appreciate the benefits of living in places we had initially not even considered. Ultimately, we ended up looking at wonderful properties in Marin that we never would have imagined at the outset of our journey, and we indeed found the perfect property in a beautiful place called Novato that was literally everything we wanted and more. Throughout our journey, David was patient, professional, and personable (he’s incredibly likable) and worked diligently with our mortgage banker and closing team to see the process though to the end. Having bought and sold a number of properties over the past 15 years, I can confidently say that David is by far the most outstanding real estate professional with whom we have worked. We will be calling David when we begin looking for our next real estate opportunity.

We worked with David to buy our current house during the first dot-​com boom in the late 90s. Then, like now, buying a house in our neighborhood was very competitive with most houses having multiple offers and being sold at well above asking, many times with cash. It was easy to get discouraged with that type of competition but David kept our spirits up and really worked with us to zero in on a great house that was everything we wanted. It was a great in a hot market that we were able to buy primarily due to David’s understanding of the seller’s situation and using it for our benefit. David showed great savvy and a real understanding of the San Francisco real estate market throughout the entire process. We could not have been more pleased with the results.